Open Distributed Science for Longevity Research

The top level concept of Denigma is Open Distributed Science developed and applied to longevity Research.

The concept of distributed means that

  • Part of Research Projects would produce knowledge artifacts that would be combined onto a larger complex artifact. These Projects are part of one big Project
  • The smaller Projects run a) in different places, b) by different people and c) at different times.

The concept of open means that anyone can participate in these Projects include people outside the Research community.

In order to achieve that we should develop an organization for that. This organization should have business processes, organizational structure, tools, and other organizational components. The possibility of such an organization is no concern - we have already seen and used some of the products developed by virtual organizations within open source community. The concern is about the validity of Research results from "open" collaborators having no or little or different Research training.

Regarding the tools, the following capabilities should be supported:

  • Project management software that supports hierarchical structure of Research Projects
  • Knowledge base that describes the organization including well-defined Research methods, business processes, Projects, etc.
  • Easy to use yet capable tool for data access and analysis. This system would include interfaces to relevant databases, data input and annotation, ontology, semantic querying, data analysis software

Regarding the overall scope of the Project, an enterprise architect would be as relevant as on Ontologist. This however is relevant if we are speaking about open distributed Research.

The Project is much smaller if a limited group of researchers using the crowd as intelligent augmentation module, where the crowd would run a big number of simple experiments, no projects can be initiated from the crowd, the crowd is merely able to send suggestions to the Researchers.

Several questions that need to be addressed to make all these possible. What kind of projects are we designing? While open Distributed Science is extremely desirable, there are concerns about whether it is possible. Can scientists design, assess, and manage "grassroot" projects that would benefit longevity Research? This is probably the fundamental question that would define Open Distributed Science. If yes, every Scientists is asked to name and shortly describe a few. o

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Tags: research, distribution, aging, science, Aging, knowledge, crowd sourcing
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